Europe evacuation flight off to China, cruise ship checked

LISBON, Portugal (AP) — An A380 passenger plane left Portugal on Thursday en route to pick up hundreds of Europeans in China who want to escape the new virus and Italian authorities were keeping some 6,000 passengers on a cruise ship while they checked for a possible infection.

The plane took off from a former military airport at Beja, 200 kilometers (120 miles) southeast of Lisbon carrying just its pilots and crew.

Captain Antonios Efthymiou said the flight would go first to Paris, where it would pick up a team of doctors and extra crew, before heading to Hanoi and then China. He told Portuguese media it would bring back about 350 Europeans.

Efthymiou described the flight as “a humanitarian mission.” He said the crew would take special medical precautions, but he did not elaborate. Portuguese Foreign Minister Augusto Santos Silva said the flight was coordinated between European Union countries and Chinese authorities.

As concerns about the cornonavirus outbreak rippled across the world, two more European airlines halted services to China and a major European company shuttered its China stores.

China has reported 170 deaths from the virus and at least 7,700 infections. More people have now been infected by this coronavirus in China than were sickened there during the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak.

In Europe, there have been 10 confirmed cases of the virus: five in France, four in Germany and one in Finland.

Italian health authorities, meanwhile, were screening passengers aboard a cruise ship docked north of Rome after a passenger from Macao came down with flu-like symptoms, officials said Thursday.

The Costa Crociere cruise line said the 54-year-old woman and her partner, who has no symptoms, were immediately put in isolation Wednesday and the case reported to...